Kittens Are Entertaining

Even when they are sleeping!

The Happiest Girl In The World...Almost

Brianna and Sherry

Brianna, like many twelve year old girls, loves horses.  My mom had given her a horse, Chocolate, to care for about a year ago.  Having Chocolate was a dream come true, but Chocolate was close to 30 years old and not exactly the most spry of all horses.  Chocolate lost her appetite and ended up a rather sick horse pretty quickly and she went on to greener pastures a few months ago.  Brianna was deeply saddened by the loss, but she knew that her horse was sick and the vet had done all she could.  Fortunately, she had a couple of weeks to say goodbye and prepare herself for the inevitable.

Since then, Brianna has lobbied for a new horse.  Her dad told her that she would have to buy her own, and as soon as she had enough money saved up, we would help her find one.  So Brianna has been saving her money, combing all the ads in the feed stores and classifieds, and telling people that she is looking for a horse.  One of the people that she told was the farrier that shoes the other horses that live here.  Last week the farrier was here and told Brianna that she thought she had found a perfect horse for Brianna.  "Sherry" (that is what Brianna has named her for now, it is still subject to change) is a rescue horse.  She is about ten years old and is a quarter horse paint/appaloosa mix.  She is a bit underweight but otherwise seems to be in excellent health.  The farrier and a friend of hers that is very knowledgeable about horses had looked her over and decided Sherry would be a wonderful horse for Brianna.  They had seen Sherry at the rescue place and went back the following day to pick her up so that no one else would snatch her up before Brianna had a chance to see her. 

Yesterday we went out to their ranch in Perris and spent nearly 3 hours with the horse, Brianna is head over heals.  The farrier and the friend have asked that we leave Sherry there for another week or two.  They would like to spend a little more time riding her to make sure she isn't easily spooked and would be safe for Brianna to ride, they also wanted to put some shoes on her back feet and try to put a bit of weight on her.  We are hoping and praying that all goes well with the horse for the next couple of weeks and she is able to come here and be a special friend for our little girl with so much love to give.

A bit underweight, but that is an easy fix.

Oh, no! Say it isn't so!

There are many things that we love about living where we do.  There are quite a few that we don't.  but overall the balance has been tipped in favor of us being really happy where we are at.  This last week the side with the things we don't like got a little added heft.  For the sixteen years that we have been out here our roads have looked like this: 

It has been a joy to live down a dirt road.  There are definitely issues with it, the dust in the house is awful, but again, the good has outweighed the bad.  It really helps to cut down on traffic which is great when you have kids riding horses and quads and even just running back and forth to their other grandma and grandpa's house (they live within really easy walking distance).  Our road is one of the few county maintained roads in the area.  And that has been really nice, too.  The roads do take a beating and this one is one of the busiest.  There are more houses in this particular area than any other in the valley.  But the dirt roads also help slow down some of the crazy drives who forget that this is a rural area where people are just out walking dogs or riding horses and kids are running back and forth to their friends houses.  Our roads are narrow and we have no sidewalks, etc.  Unfortunately, because our roads are not excessively busy and you can travel down them without seeing anyone else, some of the drivers forget that there are other people out there.  With the roads being slippery, bumpy dirt, the speeders have had incentive to slow down a bit.  Then the other day the powers that be decided that it was time for all of that to change.

I came home the other day to find that, without consulting any of the residents out here, the county decided to "fix" our road.  There are many rumors flying about the nature of this paving.  One guy told my mom that they were going way past our house, but he didn't know why or who made the decision, my brother-in-law was told that they were going to completely pave it, this first bit was just to help with erosion, etc.  And then my brother said that they told him that the county had pulled up a road somewhere close by, busted up all of the asphalt and they were just laying that down and compacting it.  That they would only go as far at the material that they had would allow.  Which is great that they are recycling, etc.  But we would rather they "helped" somewhere else. 

There are some residents in the area that will find this a huge improvement and will be very happy that "civilization" is coming to our neck of the woods.  But most of the ones that I have talked to are very, very disappointed.

Hooray for Shyla, Hooray for raw milk!

Shyla, the jersey cow, calved on April 1st.  It was her first calf and she is our first milk cow.  It has been an interesting few months around here for all of us novices.  The calf, a boy, is named Taffy.

We are big believers in the benefits of drinking raw milk.  While purely anecdotal evidence, raw milk has done wonders for my back.  I have had problems with my sciatic nerve and for a while I was visiting the chiropractor three times a week.  I couldn't sit and I had trouble walking, I was in constant pain.  The chiropractor was helpful, over the period of a couple of months, she was able to get everything adjusted enough that the pain was no longer unbearable and I could function well enough.  The cost of the visits was too much for us, and so, despite her advice to the contrary, I stopped going.  I did ok for quite a while, but I had a flare up.  I was having trouble walking again and knew that I was going to have to do something.  I was in the middle of reading a book by Ron Schmid called The Untold Story of Milk  http://www.newtrendspublishing.com/USOMilk/index.html and there was some information in there about the benefits of raw milk for nerve damage, etc.  We didn't have the $120.00/week for the chiropractor again, so I decided to try the milk diet that Mr. Schmid suggested.  For three weeks I had nothing but raw milk.  I drank nearly a gallon a day, every day, and that was it.  The first few days were tough, but after about three days I felt incredible.  After about a week my back was not bothering me hardly at all.  My back has never fully recovered, I had lost sensation in my lower leg about 2 years ago and that has never returned.  But whenever my back starts bothering me, I reach for the raw milk first.

We are very fortunate to have raw milk available here in California - for now anyway.  Organic Pastures has  great raw milk and we have gone out of our way to buy it (it is not always easy to find).  But when we moved over here to my parent's place, my mom offered to buy a milk cow if we would milk her.  She has a pig that suffered a back injury as well.  Miss Piggy, my mom's first pig, sat on her and damaged her back.  The vet said we should put her down, but my mom wanted to give her a chance.  We gave her steroids for a few days and then put her on a diet of raw milk, oats, and lots of green vegetables.  Penny (the pig) has made a remarkable recovery, she will not ever be breedable, but she does have a good quality of life and is walking and functioning.  But she does go through a lot of raw milk and it gets really expensive at $13.00/gallon.  So Shyla was brought on board.

My mom called me at 6:00 in the morning on April 1st to let me know that Shyla's calf had been born.  Bryan said she would wait until I got out there to tell me "April Fools", but she didn't - there really was a calf there.  Taffy took a while to get up and then when he finally did, Shyla would have nothing to do with feeding him.  She was full of milk and her udder was tender, she didn't want him anywhere near there.  She was a great mom, cleaning him up and staying right there with him, but she wouldn't let him eat.  We tied her up and tried to get him to nurse, that didn't work either.  Eventually we milked her into a bottle and bottle fed him.  She didn't want to have anything to do with us touching her udder either, but we finally put her in the squeeze chute and were able to get her milked.  A couple days of bottle feeding and the calf had had enough, he was strong enough to fight for his dinner and he stuck with it until she would let him nurse.

Bryan and I have been sharing milking duty.  Shyla finally reconciled herself to the fact that she was going to be milked and she has gotten pretty good about standing still.  Bryan and I have been unpleasantly surprised by how much work milking a cow is.  We have nothing but respect for old time farmers who hand milk multiple cows a day.  Most milkings we would only get three or four quarts, but our hands and arms would be sore when we got finished.  Each milking would take us about an hour and Shyla's patience was sorely tested by having to stand still that long.  A few weeks of that and we ordered a milking machine.

We have been milking by machine for about three weeks now - it has been great!  It doesn't save much time, we have traded milking time for cleaning time.  But Shyla is happy about being milked out in less than ten minutes and our hands are feeling much better.  Production has increased, we get about three gallons a day and the calf gets his share.  We are loving our raw milk and the other day when she gave me nearly three gallons in one milking I was loving that crazy machine! 

http://www.realmilk.com/

Silver Fox Rabbits

We bought our Silver Fox rabbits on February 14, 2009.  The doe (the kids named her Valentine) was already bred when we got her and we purchased a buck, Buddy, to breed her to later.   A few weeks after getting them home, Valentine produced her first litter of four kits (gestation is only 28 to 32 days) - two boys and two girls.  We sold the two boys as meat and kept the two girls to increase our breeding stock. 

After weaning the babies, it was time to rebreed Valentine.  We put her in the cage with Buddy and he showed great interest.  However, a month later there were no babies.  We tried again, leaving her in there longer.  Still no babies.  Eventually the other two girls were old enough to breed.  We put them in the cage with Buddy, still nothing.  We tried leaving the females in the cage with him for a few weeks, we tried holding the girls still for him, nothing was working.   Fortunately the American Rabbit Breeders Association Convention was in San Diego in November of last year.  There I was able to find a young buck available for sale.  Once he was old enough to breed, we introduced him to our girls and it was "love at first sight".   A month later we had babies, lots and lots of babies.  We ended up with 17 kits from the three litters. 

A few weeks after the birth of these litters, we rebred the mamas.  But we forgot how fast time goes by, the next litters were due and all of our cages were full.  It was time for the young rabbits to realize their purpose - to provide us with healthy, hopefully delicious protein.  We had never actually eaten rabbit before, this was an enterprise we jumped into trusting that we would be satisfied with the final product.  Last Tuesday, the time came to test the wisdom of that decision.

From all that I have read and heard, rabbit can be substituted in any recipe calling for chicken.  But for our first trial I wanted to try a recipe that specified rabbit.  I have a great cookbook by Shannon Hayes called The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook that I really like.  The cookbook is full of interesting profiles of farmers and informative articles on things like what to expect when buying direct from a farmer, what the cutting options are if you buy a side of beef or pork, and what the differences are between meat from grassfed animals and conventionally raised animals.  The cookbook has a recipe "Braised Rabbit with Mustard and Rosemary Sauce" that sounded good (and easy) and so that is what I tried.

1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 rabbit, about 3 1/2 lbs., cut into 8 pieces
4 to 6 tablespoons butter
1 chopped onion
1 cup dry white wine
2 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh rosemary

Combine the flour, salt, and pepper in a shallow bowl.  Dredge the meat in this flour mixture, and set aside.  Heat 2 tablespoons of the butter in a heavy, deep skillet (I just used my dutch oven).  Brown the rabbit on all sides, about 4 minutes per side, remove to a dish, and keep warm.  If necessary, add more butter to the skillet while browning the meat.

Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter to the skillet.  Saute the onions over medium heat until translucent.  Add the wine and broth, and simmer until the sauce is reduced by one-third, scraping up any browned bits.  Return the rabbit to the skillet, cover, and simmer over medium-low heat for 45 minutes, or until tender.

Remove the rabbit to a warm platter, and tent loosely with foil.  Continue simmering the sauce until reduced by half, stirring often and scraping up any browned bits.  Whisk in the mustard and rosemary.  Simmer until thickened.  Spoon sauce over rabbit, and serve.

The end result - I overcooked it!  I left the pot simmering and went out to milk the cow.  It took a little longer than I expected and some of the smaller pieces ended up a little drier than they should have. 

I have always heard that rabbit "tastes like chicken," chef Mark Bittman says that domesticated rabbit tastes like chicken because both are blank palettes upon which any desired flavors can be layered.  I thought that the rabbit was actually milder tasting than chicken.  In the end, everyone here enjoyed their dinner and they all said they would eat rabbit again, which is a good thing since we have a bunch of them in the freezer.

Some of my favorite sites:
http://www.grassfedcooking.com/  Shannon Hayes website - I can't recommend her book highly enough.
http://www.albc-usa.org/cpl/silverfox.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_Taste
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/cleanplatecharlie/2008/08/rabbit_run.php  I found this site when I was first researching rabbits.  I plan on trying the Tagliatelle with Rabbit Fricassee next weekend.

Neglect!

It has been so long since I have updated this blog - we have made many changes over the last 8 months.  Most of them have been good.

The biggest change is in our location.  We ended up being unable to keep our house and we moved over to my parent's place.  They have their own operation - http://www.thecrossroadsranch.com/ - and we have combined our efforts, finding strength in numbers.  Up until two weeks ago we lived here:

It was a blessing to have a place to live and we were incredibly grateful to have such a generous family that would provide us a place to live in exchange for the extra hands we would provide.  We finally got ourselves back into a position to be able to afford to pay for a place to live and it was becoming really tough on the kids to have such cramped quarters.  We told my parents we were planning on trying to find a place close by so that we could still help out, but they decided they would rather trade places in order to keep us around.  My dad works in Sacramento during the week and is only home on weekends and they figured that they don't need as much space as we do.  They had offered let us live in their house when we moved over initially, but we were unwilling to cause them so much inconvenience if we were unable to pay for it.  So far, all seems to be working out.

Another change is that I have returned to school.  The kids are old enough that they don't need my constant attention, and since Bryan has most Fridays off anyway, we were able to work it out for me to attend classes on Fridays and Saturdays.  My first semester is nearly over and I have had such a great time.  I am attending a junior college right now - it is the least expensive option, and the credits work just as well.  I am hoping to eventually transfer to Cal Poly, with my ultimate goal being Veterinary School.  It will be a long journey and vet school is extremely competitive as there are only a few schools and a lot of students trying to get the limited number of spaces available.  But I will be working very hard to keep my grades high and- hopefully - in 8 years I will be Stephanie Winn, DVM.

We ended up finding really good homes for the pigs and turkeys.  Annie and Ego Trip ended up in a little town outside of Sacramento.  It was so beautiful up there that we almost sent the pigs back and stayed ourselves instead.  We went back up there in December to pick up a couple of piglets from Annie's litter and it was obvious that they were both very happy in their new home.  The turkeys also went to a great home.  They stayed a bit more local, a bird enthusiast in Norco was thrilled to get them.

After we did all of our downsizing, keeping only the chickens and rabbits, we got over here and have been helping my parents build up their ranch.  They have been raising Lowline Angus for over eight years and that has been their primary focus.  They had bought one Annie's babies as a pet and fell in love with pigs.  They felt that, with our help, they would like to begin raising pigs.  Which is why we went back up to Sacramento to get some more babies.  We picked up a great boar from a farm in the Bakersfield area and then we made another trip up to Walnut Grove (not far from Sacramento - apparently all of the livestock are being raised up there.  We also picked up Shyla, the jersey cow, in that part of the state)  to get some more girls.  We have one girl that is of breeding age and we are hoping that she will produce some babies for us in the next few months.

The other addition that has been made here is Shyla, the milk cow.  She is a beautiful, two-year-old heifer.  Her first calf - a bull calf named Taffy - was born on April 1st.  Shyla and I have been working out the whole milking thing since then.  Since neither of us know what we are doing it has been rather interesting.  Fortunately she is a very patient cow and a pretty fast learner.  We are all very excited about having fresh, raw milk and the pigs are really happy that she produces more than we can drink.

There is lots more to write about.  I am planning to update more often.  As long as it has been, that shouldn't be hard! 

Save our country - Homeschool!

A few weeks ago I had three experiences that left me a little disconcerted. The first occurred at the USDA listening session that I wrote about in the blog before last. At the session, after the initial comments were made, we broke off into two groups for "discussion". This was an informal discussion where we all sat around in a circle and talked about our concerns and ideas for the program. The discussion of the the group that I was in ended up being more argumentative than anything. It did get uncomfortably close to personal attacks, which was not at all helpful. Fortunately it remained civil, but it is an issue that stirs up passion and I could see how it could have gotten ugly. Among those in our group were two young people. One was a young lady attending college, studying agricultural sciences and the other was a young man who worked in the cattle business. I would guess that they were both in their early twenties, but as I didn't ask it is only speculation. The thing that bothered me was that both of these young people argued strongly in favor of NAIS. They believe that the program is necessary, must be mandatory, there should be no provisions for small farmers, and the government is the institution that needs to run it. They were definitely the strongest proponents for the program in our group.



The second was a visit we had from a young man to our farm. We were looking at the animals and had gotten to the meat chickens. I commented to him that we were getting ready to process the birds and he asked if we did that ourselves. I told him that we did. His questions were saddening, he asked, "Can you do that? Don't you need some kind of a permit or something?"



And the third was a conversation we had with some friends about homeschooling. We were talking about our philosophy of education and such and they asked the same questions that come up time after time, "Who do you report to? What about testing? They will let you do that?"


All three of these were within a few days of each other and I got the feeling that I had lost my country. I have been reading The Libertarian Reader edited by David Boaz and one of the essays is by John Stuart Mill. I haven't read much of Mill's work, but I believe that many of his writings have been destructive to our culture. His ideas on Utilitarianism are very dangerous and his attempt to separate God and morality is absurd. However, in his essay on individuality this passage caught my attention


"That the whole or any large part of the education of the people should be in State hands, I go as far as any one in deprecating. All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of education. A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominate power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a disposition over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exists at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried forth for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence."


Obviously this is exactly what we have gotten. People have become conditioned to government control in their lives to the point that they ask for more - NAIS, Universal Health care, Clean Energy Bill, etc. The other day I saw a bumper sticker that made me smile, "I will keep my guns, my money, and my freedom, you can keep the 'change'."


This past weekend, Bryan, Jared, and I went to Long Beach for the CHEA (Christain Home Educators Association) Homeschool Convention. What a wonderful time. We have been home educating our kids for 5 years and have settled into our philosophy and methods, but we still enjoy going to the conventions for the encouragement and reinforcement that we get. This year's convention did not disappoint. The keynote speaker was Dr. Voddie Baucham (http://www.voddiebaucham.org/) and we really were motivated by his talks on the importance of a strong, Christian worldview. It is always a blessing to be able to get together with literally thousands of fellow homeschoolers who share the same vision of education. Throughout the year the temptation comes up to just put the kids in a school so that we would be able to get that second income that would ease the crunch. But after a weekend of so many inspiring speakers and being around all those wonderful families, we are reminded that we would rather live in a tent and be able to raise our children "in the fear and admonition of the LORD" than to allow our government schools the opportunity to indoctrinate our children with a worldview that is in opposition to everything we believe. For anyone that stumbles across this blog, I hope and pray that you will strongly consider bringing your children back home for their education. It is a sacrifice and it is daunting, but we only get to raise our children once and how we raise ours will affect how they raise theirs. Dr. Baucham has an excellent blog about making the decision to homeschool - http://www.voddiebaucham.org/vbm/Blog/Entries/2009/6/25_Top_Five_REasons_Not_to_Send_Your_Kids_Back_to_Govt._School.html

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

Proverbs 22:6 (NIV)